A half-dozen or so Mercenaries for Udall just finished a round of push-ups outside a Highlands Ranch middle school and it’s time for another chant: “1-2-3-4, Udall gives us more war.”

Sam “Kitty Killer” Clayton, who sports a camo jacket and some rather un-mercenary red glitter glasses, hands a woman in a blue sweatshirt a pamphlet outlining Democrat Mark Udall’s votes to continue Iraq war funding. In return he gets a compliment on his legs, shown to their best effect in a pair of red tights despite the freezing temperatures.

Welcome to the world of guerrilla politics.

A raucous form of political dissent incubated in the 1960s, “street heat” is again in vogue, and it’s coming to the campaign for Colorado’s open U.S. Senate seat.

The fact that Udall would be considered liberal by most voters — and that Colorado offers a sea of potential targets far more supportive of Bush’s war policy than the congressman from Eldorado Springs — misses the point. Left-wing activists say they plan to spend the next year dogging Udall precisely because — unlike, say, Wayne Allard or Marilyn Musgrave — they believe they can change Udall’s mind on funding the war.

Attacking “politics as usual”

And if they can’t? Are they willing to risk helping put Bob Schaffer, Udall’s likely Republican opponent, in the Senate?

Absolutely.

“I think this is going to help the Republican win. And hopefully that sends a message to the Democrats about how destructive their stance on the war is and how they can’t keep doing the same thing,” said one of Mercenaries, Ryan “Eat Your Heart” Hartman.

Whether the “passionate Left” can make a real electoral difference in a statewide race is certainly an open question. Analysts say they may in fact help Udall, underlining for voters he is less of a lock-step liberal than the GOP wants to suggest.

“While it will be distracting and irritating, it will no doubt make the argument to the public that Udall is hewing a somewhat more moderate line, that he is more part of the ‘responsible’ Left,” said Floyd Ciruli, a Denver political analyst.

Nonetheless, the activists present a delicate problem for Udall, one not shared by his Republican opponent: How do you run a statewide Senate campaign while dodging a minefield of skits, video flogging, heckling and pamphleteering — all lobbed from your own side of the political spectrum?

The congressman has already been a victim of a Nederland-based group whose members heckle politicians, then post the results on YouTube.

In 2007, Udall made few public appearances in Boulder County, and the only nearby town meeting took place under heavy security and was moderated by the local district attorney. Even then, it often looked more like a Jerry Springer episode than a civil exercise in democracy.

The level of respectfulness and tact varies, but the point of the actions are the same — to undermine the terrain of what they see as “politics as usual.”

“I’d rather spend my Saturdays going for a hike, but if Mark Udall is going to have an event, I feel compelled to come down and show my opposition,” said Carolyn Bninski, a slight, gray-haired woman and activist who was arrested last spring with a group of protesters who occupied Udall’s district office over two weeks.

Helping or hurting party?

Democrats have reaped substantial benefit from the resurgence of a confrontational political culture of the Left — all those acid-penned bloggers and 800-pound grass-roots gorillas like MoveOn.org.

Now back in power in Washington, the party’s leaders are increasingly finding themselves among the targets.

Protesters have slept on mattresses outside the San Francisco home of Nancy Pelosi and sent choirs into congressional offices to “sing for peace.” They unfurled a peace banner nearly three stories high in a congressional office building.

“We believe the party will be stronger and these candidates will be stronger and the incumbents will be better members of the party as a result of this,” said Progressive Democrats of America director Tim Carpenter, whose followers have bird-dogged prominent Democrats across the country and whose local chapter plans to take part in Udall demonstrations during the campaign.

Democrats in office are forced to work among the gray shades of political reality, he said, including the fact that they don’t have enough votes in the U.S. Senate to fundamentally change Iraq war policy.

Vflog.com peppers politicos

The worst scenario for Salazar’s boss is if the Senate race is close, and the declared Green candidate, Bob Kinsey, draws enough progressive-voter support to tilt the race.

“They have a point of view, they want to express it loudly,” Salazar said, “and if that results in the election of a very conservative Republican who is going to disagree with them on everything, then I guess they see that as social change.”

Salazar is talking about people like Kathleen Chippi and Laura Kriho. Sharp-tongued and opinionated, the women are the political equivalent of a pair of ninjas, and sitting in a cafe in Nederland recently, they unpack their kit-bag of weaponry — a small, hand-held video camera and laptop computer.

Founders of a group called Vflog.com., the two show up in offices or catch political figures on the street, peppering them with pointed questions, then posting their often surprised responses on YouTube. When John Ashcroft visited the University of Colorado last year, they asked the former attorney general if he’d be willing to undergo the controversial interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and his befuddled response made it into blogs of the New York Times and Time magazine.

Udall was one of their first targets. They videotaped a town hall meeting in Thornton in September, and the resulting clips show the congressman struggling at several points to keep his composure under fierce heckling.

“The idea is to use public shame” to create change, Kriho said.

“We’ve been polite long enough, (and) has it gotten us anywhere?” added Chippi. “This is the voice of democracy.”

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